A review by heidihaverkamp
Negroland by Margo Jefferson

5.0

Jefferson taught me things about growing up "black aristocracy" in Hyde Park (also Park Manor and Bronzeville) that, as a white Hyde Park native, I needed and wanted to know. She went to the Lab School as one of very few black students in the 50s and 60s. Her careful, poignant storytelling about the strain of feeling she must be twice as good as white students, she must be perfect in all things, she must know everything about black history and Shakespeare and caring for her hair made me exhausted just reading about it. Her accounts of young black suicides in her teenage years broke my heart.